Officials are investigating a shooting incident in Baghdad in which at least eight civilians were reported killed by private US security contractors.

The private security workers, who were employed by the US State Department, apparently opened fire after their convoy came under attack on Sunday.

At least 13 people were also injured in the shooting in a busy part of Baghdad.

Another witness, Muhammad Hussein, saw his brother killed in the gunfight.

“I was driving behind my brother’s car and suddenly there was an explosion and firing. I tried to figure out what was happening when I saw a black convoy ahead of us,” he told the AFP news agency.

“Soon after I saw my brother slump in the car. I dragged him out of the car and tried to hide to avoid the firing but realised that he had been shot in the chest and was already dead,” he said.

They are often heavily armed, but critics say some are not properly trained – even trigger-happy – and are not accountable except to their employers.
(Source: BBC News)

The US is already wringing its hands and Rice is squeezing out those crocodile tears about these murders. As if she gives a damn: what’s eight more lives compared to the 655,000 – 1.2 million the illegal US invasion has already claimed?

Here’s some more about those defenders of freedom and democracy, Blackwater:

Backwater — founded by ultra-right-wing Christian conservatives — hires Pinochet-era Chilean war-criminals, ex-law-enforcement types and former military, and others to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan — and in America. They can and do murder civilians with impunity, they line their pockets with cost-plus multi-billion-dollar military expenditures…
(Source: Boing Boing)

Blackwater isn’t an aberration, it’s Bush and co.’s dream team!

The Iraq government has revoked Blackwater’s operations licences. A full investigation will be held. The most that will happen is that a few hands will be slapped before being allowed to dip once more into American taxpayers’ funds.

The Blackwater chiefs will remain sanugine, just as the ultimate villains behind these deaths, the neo-Nazis who have infiltrated the US government, will sleep soundly tonight.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of protesters marched Saturday from the White House to the Capitol to demand an end to the Iraq war, leading to the arrests of at least 150 people.

Many of the protesters were arrested without a struggle after they jumped over a barricade near the base of the Capitol. But some grew angry as police attempted to push them back using large black shields and a chemical spray. Protesters responded by throwing signs and chanting: “Shame on you.”

Before arriving at the Capitol lawn, the demonstrators marched on Pennsylvania Avenue holding banners and signs and saying, “What do we want? Troops out. When do we want it? Now.”

At the Capitol lawn, some protesters lay down with signs on top of their bodies to represent soldiers killed in Iraq.
(Source: CommonDreams.org)

The world is stirring. Mass antiwar protests this week in Germany and, now, on the lawn of the White House.

This also shows why parliamentary democracy isn’t true democracy: over two million Britons marched to stop Butcher Blair plunging this country into an illegal invasion of Iraq. Did he care? No. Our voices were ridiculed and marginalised, in the bourgeois media and the dinner parties of the ruling classes.

Four years later, the latest survey estimates over one million Iraqis dead. A grand adventure, a massive slaughter we were party to, urged on by Blair’s lies about WMDs being poised and ready. We were “45 minutes” from attack, he lied.

At the US antiwar protest, there was apparently a tiny counter-protest. This consisted of the usual neo-Nazi nutters, demanding that anti-war Americans leave the country. This moronic argument always amazes me: what gives these fools the right to claim America? Where is it written that you can only be an American if you’re a right-wing, homophobic, woman-hating, KKK-loving arsehole?

Here’s some of my favourite Americans:

The above are true, all-American heroes and heroines.

Just like the 150 Americans arrested for protesting against the insane evil of the Iraq occupation.

A startling new household survey of Iraqis released last week claims as many as 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq – apparently lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.

More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

Previous estimates, most prominently collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, reported in Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number, 654,965, as a likely figure in a possible range of 390,000 to 940,000.

The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and rubbished by George Bush and British officials. In private, however, the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as ‘close to best practice’.
(Source: The Observer)

I’m sickened by this new survey. But not surprised. After all, the Lancet study, the only scientific appraisal of Iraq fatalities so far, reported 655,000 dead almost a year ago. And Iraq has hardly been a land of milk and honey since then, despite what Bush, Blair, Brown and the rest of the war criminals have been claiming.

There is nothing I can say about this evil. I know that money I’ve paid in taxes has gone towards killing innocent Iraqis. It makes me fucking sick.

I’m going to this:

This is the only option Britons have: we have to protest and protest and protest. We have to let the criminals in Parliament know that we haven’t forgotten their war crimes. We want to see them stand trial for those crimes.

If you feel powerless, if this latest survey makes you feel as sick and angry as I do, then go on this demo and show the government, show the world, that Britons wish to have no further part in this great evil.

Senior US officials have singled out Iran for criticism, a day after giving a progress report on security in Iraq.

Gen David Petraeus, top US commander in Iraq, and US envoy to Baghdad Ryan Crocker both cited evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on US troops.
(Source: BBC News)

Soooo… let’s see.

The USA invents evidence for WMDs and uses these lies to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq. This evil is backed by our own Butcher Blair.

No WMDs are found. The USA doesn’t care. It doesn’t leave Iraq… not while that tasty oil is there.

Then the USA occupation goes on to torture the citizens it was meant to be liberating, seize their oil and install a puppet government.

Oh, and kill 655,000+ civilians. The US military kills around 300 Iraqis a day. (Those deaths are NOT the result of “insurgent” terrorism.)

And now, the USA claims that Iran is a “troublesome neighbour?”

Really. Words fail me.